One of the main issues with 3D printers today is that they lack in one area; speed.

3D printers lack in a whole lot of areas, and speed is not at the top of the list. There are a ton of things that you can't do with a 3d printer because the parts are too large, too intricate, need different materials than 3d printers can handle, or are too expensive to 3d print. As more of those problems are solved, the range of things you can plausibly 3d print expands significantly. Now once you can print something in 12 hours, it's great if you could print it in 2 hours or 20 minutes instead, but just being able to do it at all is the biggest step.

Eddie Krassenstein and cohorts, have been at this constantly for the past months. They have made up so many stories, which lack any kind of verification. Do not trust anything that comes from 3Dprint.com. It's just a bunch of marketing assholes trying to make their web-property more valuable by pumping out bullshit that people scoop up and retransmit.
Slashdot, please don't stoop this low.

Like a lot of other people have stated right now Speed really isn't an issue. It isn't like you need to be tethered to your 3D printer the whole time it is doing its thing. You just have to make sure it gets the first layer to adhere and then you can pretty much go do anything else while it does its finishes up. Popping in to check on it once and a while to make sure everything hasn't gone pearshaped.

Even for really lengthy prints (4-5hrs+) it still beats the heck out of ordering parts and the week+ for them to arrive.

I've seen far too many "whizkid makes incredible invention" turn out to be "parent's pet project attributed to kid for fame and glory". School science projects are not meant to be an exercise in outsourcing to parents either.

People can claim all they want but without evidence, repeatable test results and peer review its worthless.

And just because they have some 'patent pending' tech doesn't mean they have either a working printer that does what they claim or a patent that's worth anything or even a design that is actually patentable. For all we know the patent is in fact worthless and they are trying to sell it to someone before they realise...

My brother has a son who was considered gifted at that age too. Today he's a 20-something college drop out who has never held a real job in his entire life and hides in his bedroom for all but the most important (he's getting food or gifts of some kind) occasions. Slashdot is filled with people like this. Being gifted means nothing.

Though that marketing video, while "snazzy", is pretty pedestrian, as marketing videos go.

There are some bona fide "kid geniuses" out there who have done amazing things (though many with lots of help from family/friends/other adult geniuses). That said, there are 100 times more who talk a good line, but have nothing to show for it.

I'll wait until I see the goods before I pronounce anyone "kid genius".

Slashdot needs to knock it off with these "Child genius is going to totally upstage all those stupid companies and make something amazing!" stories they run some time. The thing is, they are essentially never true and we as geeks should know better.

Smart kids often have the problem of thinking they know everything. They have the brains to be well above their peers at pretty much everything, and so have a confidence in their knowledge and intelligence, but lack the experience to understand the limitations of both in the larger world. Hence they'll think that they have found an "obvious" solution to a problem in the world that nobody else has managed to think of. I'm sure most of us felt like that at one time or another as children.

However, it turns out that smart kids become smart adults, and those smart adults get job making the thing we use, solving the problems we have, and so on. So, usually if there's something that hasn't been solved, the reason is that there is NOT a simple solution. There isn't something that a kid will just say "Oh look, here's a better way to do it." Rather it is a complex problem and thus the solutions are complex.

So Slashdot needs to quit with stories on shit like this unless there' something to back it up. A printer actually gets released based on this kids design? Ok that's a story. Some kid says he can do way better than anyone else? That's not a story. That is, to quote the Reapers, "A confidence borne of ignorance." It's not news.

I am skeptical. If you're using FDM, I think that in order to print 10X faster, you can't use either ABS or PLA. The print head of the machine will have to be very low mass, which also rules out plastics with high melt temperatures like ABS and PLA. I don't think FDM printing can achieve a 10X speed increase.

If you go to stereolithography where you're using a projector to harden a photopolymer, you might achieve a 10X speed increase with the right chemistry and the right light source.

Without any evidence of what the kid is doing or even knowing if he has built an operational prototype, meh. All sorts of people claim all sorts of stuff on the internet without backing any of it up.